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Final Performance of the Merce Cunningham Company in December

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A cornerstone of the Cunningham Dance Foundation’s precedent-setting Legacy Plan, the Legacy Tour is a celebration of Cunningham’s lifetime of artistic achievement and a testament to the choreographer’s enduring genius. Launched in February 2010, the two-year tour offerd audiences around the world a final opportunity to see Cunningham’s choreography performed by the company he personally trained. The Tour will culminate with a New Year’s Eve performance in New York City — MCDC’s home since it was founded in 1953 — on December 31, 2011. As outlined in the Legacy Plan, the Company will disband following this final performance. Merce Cunningham made this decision himself a while before his death. The Legacy Tour showcased 18 seminal works from throughout Cunningham’s career — including the revival of seven dances from past Company repertory — and highlighted the collaborations with artistic innovators such John Cage, Jasper Johns, Radiohead, and Robert Rauschenberg that characterized Cunningham’s creative life.
Cunningham must have considered how his late contemporaries had handled their heritages and decided against following their examples. The José Limón and Martha Graham companies have soldiered on — keeping classics of the repertory polished, commissioning new works that, with luck, complement those of the master, and developing strategies to attract those too young to have seen the companies when their founders were alive. Alwin Nikolais's works have a home in Salt Lake City's Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, a separate adjunct to the organization's contemporary repertory. George Balanchine's New York City Ballet has always been to some degree a repertory company, although his work predominates. A large, well-supported establishment, NYCB commissions gifted choreographers who work with the classical vocabulary, but it too must come up with attention-getting projects (consider Peter Martins's Ocean's Kingdom to the first-ever ballet score by Sir Paul McCartney, premiering September 22).
It's not surprising that Merce Cunningham didn't envision a future for his company without him. As an artist, he appeared to think in the present tense, to live in the moment. Like the philosopher Heraclitus, he clearly believed that you couldn't step into the same stream twice. Along with his long-time musical director and partner, John Cage, he embraced the riskiness of chance procedures in composition, and unforeseen intersections of dance, music, and décor in performance. He wanted dancing to mean itself or to mean whatever the spectator wanted it to. He could be slightly entrancingly enigmatic—once writing, for instance, that "the body shooting into space is not an idea of man's freedom, but is the body shooting into space. And that very action ... is man's freedom." He referred to climaxes in choreography as "privileged moments" and did his best to avoid them.
The Legacy Plan is the first of its kind in the dance world, and involves systematic preparation, a high-profile international tour, comprehensive documentation and digitizing efforts and, at the appropriate time, a thorough and well-prepared closure of the Cunningham Dance Foundation’s operations and organized handover to the Merce Cunningham Trust. One of the points was also providing dancers, musicians and staff with compensation and resources for career transition upon closure of Company. Source: www.villagevoice.com, www.merce.org

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